Aims to solve chronic shortage of new hospital investment by removing this from Treasury spending restrictions and speed up building in the wake of some notoriously slow NHS-led projects.
The first Scottish PFI hospitals are at Hairmyres and Law in Lanarkshire and the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
However, many argue that it is an expensive way of funding such projects. The recently announced new Southern General Hospital in Glasgow is to be entirely funded by the public sector.